Grave Yard, Bishopsquarter, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Burial Grounds
On a low ridge of good meadowland in County Clare, a graveyard quietly layers several centuries of burial practice around the shell of a medieval church.
The site at Bishopsquarter is not simply old; it is a place where the sequence of the dead can almost be read like a map, with plain unworked stones and flat slabs of probable eighteenth-century origin giving way to the more elaborate box-tombs of the nineteenth century, and then to marble headstones of the twentieth century arranged to the east of the church. The whole assembly sits within an earlier ecclesiastical enclosure, suggesting that organised religious activity here predates even the medieval building at its northern end.
The graveyard is roughly subrectangular in shape, running approximately 85 metres along a northeast to southwest axis and around 60 metres across, enclosed now by a mortared stone wall of modern construction. The medieval church stands at the northern end, and just to the west of its western gable lies a shell midden, a deposit of discarded shells and other domestic debris that typically indicates prehistoric or early historic occupation nearby. That three distinct monument types, the enclosure, the church, and the midden, should occur in such close proximity points to a long and layered period of use. Midway along the western side of the graveyard stands a vault, built originally for Henry Comerford and later associated with both the Comerford and Blake-Foster families, as recorded by Swinfen in 1992. The site was named and mapped on the Ordnance Survey six-inch editions of both 1842 and 1915, confirming its recognised place in the local landscape across at least the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.